On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 4:13 PM, Ian Campbell <ijc@hellion.org.uk> wrote:
> On Fri, 2013-10-25 at 07:51 -0700, Andrew Kane wrote:
>
>> As someone who deals with a lot of random donated hardware, I can
>> attest that we run into these cases frequently.
>
> Interesting data point, thanks. hat sort of vintage of random hardware
> are you seeing?
The majority of what we see is about 4-8 years old, I'd say. The
oldest system I remember seeing was a 486; until recently we had a few
ISA SCSI cards in inventory. Really old stuff like that mostly gets
disassembled and recycled, so I'm not including it in my estimation.
A lot of these boxes are ones that one would reasonably expect to
support booting from USB, but in some cases the option isn't there in
the BIOS setup or boot menu and in others the option is there but is
ignored on boot some or all of the time. The inability to boot from a
DVD correlates slightly with the former case but not with the latter;
for us it's moot anyway since we have a cd-sized Xubuntu install disk.
>
> Do these systems have NICs but not PXE support?
We don't yet have a PXE server set up, that's in progress but waiting
for me to complete a few other projects first ;)
> Could something like
> http://etherboot.org/wiki/isolinux be useful to boot such a system from
> CDROM to kick off a network boot?
I expect it would. Any live media that provides GRUB can also be used
to grab a PXE boot IIRC- though I've not done it yet.
--
Helping Seattle's Needy Get Nerdy
http://freegeekseattle.org/wiki/index.php/Free_Geek_Seattle:Abouthttp://freegeekseattle.org/wiki/index.php/Projects
Maillist:
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/freegeek-seattle
IRC:
#freegeek-sea on freenode
freegeekseattle.org